Susan Bernofsky on Robert Walser

An online podcast

Robert Walser

From Scott Esposito (Center for the Art of Translation):

In 1993 when Susan Bernofsky published her first book-length translation of Robert Walser, the author was little-known in English and virtually unread in the United States. By 2009, when Bernofsky’s translation of The Tanners signified that all of Walser’s novels were available in English for the first time, the release of that book was greeted with praise from publications as diverse as BookForum, Time Out New York, and the Los Angeles Times.

The rise of Walser in translation over the past two decades has been nothing short of stunning, and it is thanks in no small part to a group of fine translators, of whom Bernofsky has played a leading roll. Since her first publication of Walser in 1993 she has published two other books by him, with two more on the way, as well as a critical biography of the author. No less a reader than the Nobel-winning novelist and critic J.M. Coetzee—one of Walser’s great contemporary admirers—has praised Bernofsky’s translations for their “ingenuity” and “resourcefulness” in dealing with his wide vocabulary and highly precise prose.

Walser lived from 1878 to 1956, although it is widely believed that he gave up writing after 1933 when he committed himself to a sanatorium. In his time his writing received praise from the likes of Kafka, Musil, and Walter Benjamin, but after his death he fell into obscurity in Europe, and it was only in the 1960s and ‘70s that he began to be known again on that continent. Susan Sontag took up the cause of Walser in the U.S. in the 1980s, but wasn’t until the late ‘90s and the ‘00s, with the translation of a number of his major works, that he began to become known here.

Bernofsky has described Walser’s prose as walking “a fine line between the maudlin and the trivially playful,” going on to say that he “always manages to stay right in the middle, in that sweet spot where he achieves a sort of guileless profundity that takes the reader by surprise again and again.” The translation of such writing is difficult to say the least, and we are fortunate that Bernofsky has proven herself up to the challenge time and time again.

In addition to Walser, Bernofsky has translated German-language works from the renowned Japanese author Yoko Tawada, as well as Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse for The Modern Library, and others. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including ones from the PEN Translation Fund, the NEA, and the Lannan Foundation. [Read More]

Find Robert Walser on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Robert Walser, Berlin Stories
• The Small Voice of Robert Walser
• Robert Walser, A Schoolboy’s Diary and Other Stories
• W. G. Sebald on Robert Walser
• J. M. Coetzee on Robert Walser

The Unread and the Unreadable

From Andrew Gallix's 'In Theory' column

Monument of James Joyce in Trieste. (Source.)

Andrew Gallix (The Guardian) (thanks to Lucy Menon for the link):

There was a time when a learned fellow (literally, a Renaissance man) could read all the major extant works published in the western world. Information overload soon put paid to that. Since there is "no end" to "making many books" – as the Old Testament book Ecclesiastes prophesied, anticipating our digital age – the realm of the unread has spread like a spilt bottle of correction fluid. The librarian in Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities only scans titles and tables of contents: his library symbolises the impossibility of reading everything today. The proliferation of lists of novels that you must, allegedly, have perused in your lifetime, reflects this problem while compounding it. On a recent visit to a high street bookshop, I ogled a well-stacked display table devoted to "great" novels "you always meant to read". We measure out our lives with unread books, as well as coffee spoons. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Is Modernism Boring?
• 'A House of Life': Anthony Burgess on James Joyce

Miklós Szentkuthy, Marginalia on Casanova

A new title from Contra Mundum Press

Miklós Szentkuthy, Marginalia on Casanova

From Contra Mundum Press:

Translated by Tim Wilkinson for the very first time into English from the original Hungarian, this publication, which has already received an award from the Petofi Literary Museum, may prove to be one of the most momentous releases of the decade.

Szentkuthy is hailed by many as the Hungarian equivalent of Joyce, Proust, and Musil and, to date, his works have been translated into French, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovakian, and Spanish. Marginalia on Casanova is the first book of Szentkuthy’s epic ten volume St. Orpheus Breviary which, as Csaba Sík noted, “represents the greatest enterprise in scope, in worth? – undertaken in the Hungarian novel.”

Marginalia on Casanova is the first volume of the St. Orpheus Breviary, Miklós Szentkuthy’s synthesis of 2,000 years of European culture. As Szentkuthy’s Virgil, St. Orpheus is an omniscient poet who guides us not through hell, but through all of recorded history, myth, religion, and literature, albeit reimagined as St. Orpheus metamorphosizes himself into kings, popes, saints, tyrants, and artists. At once pagan and Christian, Greek and Hebrew, Asian and European, St. Orpheus is a mosaic of history and mankind in one supra-person and veil, an endless series of masks and personae, humanity in its protean, futural shape, an always changing function of discourse, text, myth, and mentalité.

Through St. Orpheus’s method, disparate moments of history become synchronic, are juggled to reveal, paradoxically, mutual difference and essential similarity. “Orpheus wandering in the infernal regions,” says Szentkuthy, “is the perennial symbol of the mind lost amid the enigmas of reality. The aim of the work is, on the one hand, to represent the reality of history with the utmost possible precision, and on the other, to show, through the mutations of the European spirit, all the uncertainties of contemplative man, the transiency of emotions and the sterility of philosophical systems.”

Marginalia on Casanova relives the spiritualization of the main protagonist’s sensual adventures, though it is less his sex life and more his intellectual mission, the sole determinant of his being, which is the focus of this mesmeric book. Through his own glittering associations and broadly spanning array of metaphors, Szentkuthy analyses and views the 18th century and its notion of homogeneity from the vantage point of the 20th century, with the full armor of someone who was, perhaps, one of the last Hungarian Europeans. While a commentary on Casanova’s memoirs, it is also Szentkuthy’s very own philosophy of love.

Passion, playfulness, irony, and a whole gamut of protean metamorphoses are what characterize Marginalia on Casanova, a work in which readers will experience both profundity and a taking to wing of essay-writing that is intellectually radiant and as sensual and provocative as a gondola ride with Casanova.

Featuring an introduction by Zéno Bianu , an afterword by Maria Tompa, the literary executor of the Szentkuthy Estate, and an original cover design by noted Hungarian artist István Orosz.

About the Author & Translator

Miklós Szentkuthy (1908-1988) is the author of masterpieces such as Prae, the St. Orpheus Breviary, Testament of the Muses, and Towards the One and Only Metaphor, and is recognized as one of the most significant and prolific Hungarian writers of the 20th century. Szentkuthy composed an oeuvre both imposing and complex, centered on the conflict between art and life, or the aspiration for holiness and eroticism. In addition to his many novels, essays, short stories, and memoire-interviews, he also translated numerous texts into Hungarian including Joyce’s Ulysses, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Dickens’ Oliver Twist, and works by Twain, Poe, and many others.

Tim Wilkinson has translated a number of substantial works on Hungarian history and culture including Éva Balázs, Hungary and the Habsburgs 1765-1800 (1997), Domokos Kosáry, Hungary and International Politics in 1848-1849 (2003), and others. In the literary field, he has translated works by Imre Kertész and many other contemporary prose writers. The US edition of his tr. of Fatelessness was awarded the PEN American Center’s PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize (2005). His tr. of Kertesz’s Fiasco is a finalist for Three Percent’s Best Translated Book Award (2012).

Excerpts and Information:

• http://www.hlo.hu/news/zeno_bianu_boudoir_theology
• http://www.hlo.hu/news/miklos_szentkuthy_marginalia_on_casanova_excerpts

Miklós Szentkuthy, Marginalia on Casanova (New York: Contra Mundum Press, 2012).
ISBN 9780983697244.
20 USD, 16 GBP, 14 €.
Bookstores can order through Ingram. Otherwise, copies can be acquired through local retailers or via Amazon and similar sites worldwide.

For a review, desk copy, or interview request, write to: info@contramundum.net

Website

Contra Mundum Press

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Contra Mundum Press awarded grant
• Contra Mundum Press
• Stuart Kendall translates Gilgamesh
• Rainer J. Hanshe, The Acolytes
• Rainer J. Hanshe on The Acolytes
• Ghérasim Luca, Self-Shadowing Prey

Maurice Blanchot: Corrected Proofs

A page from Blanchot's corrected proof of L'Entretien Infini (The Infinite Conversation)

A page from Maurice Blanchot's corrected proofs of L'Entretien Infini, showing changes made by Blanchot. MS Fr 497. Purchased with the Class of 1952 Manuscript Fund, the Amy Lowell Trust, and the Patrick Grant Second Memorial Fund, 2009.

A 2010 news story from the Harvard Gazette:

As a novelist, literary theorist, journalist and philosopher, Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) had a profound impact on the thinking of dozens of philosophers, novelists, and writers. Until recently, however, it remained unclear how Blanchot’s thinking had evolved over his lifetime. A famously reclusive figure in the literary world, it was believed Blanchot had destroyed most of his personal papers before his death.

With the Houghton Library’s recent acquisition of corrected page proofs of Blanchot’s major 1969 work L’Entretien Infini (“The Infinite Conversation”), however, scholars should soon be able to shed new light on Blanchot’s changing political and literary attitudes.

The pages were salvaged from a rubbish bin by the husband of Blanchot’s long-time housekeeper, and contain numerous handwritten annotations by Blanchot, along with typewritten sheets inserted into the proofs – some of which consist of small slips taped over pages, while others are multiple pages in length.

The proofs, along with several other Blanchot manuscripts, came up for sale in March 2009. Hoping the material might find an institutional home where it could be preserved and made accessible to scholars, Smith Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Professor of Comparative Literature Christy McDonald approached Leslie Morris, Houghton Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts with the idea of purchasing the items. [Read More]

See also: A conversation about the proofs of Maurice Blanchot’s L’Entretien infini at Houghton Library [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Michel Foucault on Maurice Blanchot
• Maurice Blanchot and Romanticism
• Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster
• Corrected Proof: Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
• J. G. Ballard Manuscripts at British Library
• Manuscript page of Don DeLillo's Libra
• Watt: Samuel Beckett's Wartime Manuscripts
• Beckett Digital Manuscript Project

Robert Walser, The Walk

'Kafka's closest twin brother'

Robert Walser

Andrew Scrima (The Rumpus) reviews Robert Walser's The Walk, translated by Susan Bernofsky:

Among Walser’s early admirers were Robert Musil, Hermann Hesse, Stefan Zweig, and Franz Kafka; indeed, many years later, Martin Walser (who is unrelated to the late Swiss writer) called him “Kafka’s closest twin brother.” In his 1929 essay on Robert Walser, Walter Benjamin asserted that everything the author had to say was essentially overshadowed by the significance of writing itself. “The moment he takes a pen to hand, he is seized by a desperado mood. Everything seems lost to him, a gush of words comes pouring out in which each sentence has the sole purpose of rendering the previous one forgotten.” This “shame,” this “chaste, artful clumsiness” is transformed into “garlands of language” with thought stumbling through them in the form of a “pickpocket, a scallywag, and a genius, like the heroes […] that come out of the night where it is at its blackest.” Flickering in this blackness, however, are “meager lanterns of hope.”

Yet the hope that shines forth in the moments of self-knowledge, transcendence, and grace Walser describes is anything but meager. On the contrary, it is exultation the writer feels when he perceives the sublime in the tiniest details of everyday life. As the narrator passes through the gentle countryside, he enters a rapturous state in which he attains to an almost holy connection with the present: “I felt as if someone were calling me by name, or as if someone were kissing and soothing me […] the soul of the world had opened, and I fantasized that everything wicked, distressing and painful was on the point of vanishing […]. All notion of the future paled and the past dissolved. In the glowing present I myself glowed. […] The earth became a dream; I myself had become an inward being, and I walked as in an inward world. […] In the sweet light of love I believed I was able to recognize—or required to feel—that the inward self is the only self which really exists.” Yet the terrifying Tomzack, the destitute giant who has crossed the narrator’s path only a short time before, is surely a mirror image of the author, who must have intimated the fate in store for him. One can’t help wondering what effect Walser, who spent the last twenty-seven years of his life in an asylum, might have had on modern literature (or even European history) if his writing had found a wider public. In a remark that was perhaps less a naïve belief in the power of literature to save humanity from its own catastrophes than a reflection on the unbridgeable distance between Walser’s unique sensibility and the cultural climates that evolved during the rise of Nazi Germany and in the aftermath of the war, Hermann Hesse once claimed that “if poets like Robert Walser could be counted among our foremost intellects, there wouldn’t be any war. If he had 100,000 readers, the world would be a better place.”

In his essay “Le promeneur solitaire,” Sebald describes the difficulty in categorizing Robert Walser: on the one hand he was oppressed by shadows and on the other radiated amicability. He composed humorous works out of sheer desperation in an elusive prose teeming with fleeting images and ephemeral figures. The self remained missing or hidden behind an array of passers-by; he almost always wrote the same thing, yet never repeated himself. Sebald points out that Walser’s writing tended towards a radical minimalism and abbreviation from the very beginning, while simultaneously exhibiting a contrary propensity for the minutely described detail, the playful arabesque. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Robert Walser, The Microscripts
• Robert Walser, Selected Stories
• That Other Word: Free Literature Podcast
• That Other Word: Episode 3
• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Writers: W. G. Sebald

Will Self, Kafka's Wound: A Digital Literary Essay

An interactive online essay with digital footnotes

Will Self, 'Kafka's Wound: A Digital Essay'

Wow. What a fascinating idea. Interactive cultural hub "The Space" has just posted Will Self's interactive online essay, 'Kafka's Wound: A Digital Essay'.  Written on commission from the London Review of Books (LRB), the project outlines Self's interest in Kafka's short story, 'A Country Doctor'. His preparation for the essay has been the source of some reflection, recounted in a blog he kept before the piece was published [Read More].

What is remarkable about the essay is the extent to which it utilises multimedia to tell its story. Self's digital footnotes can be accessed as one reads, and to some degree they recall the fiction of W. G. Sebald (to say nothing of Self's recent work). Among the extras is a complete English translation of the Kafka story itself, along with academic commentaries on the work; there are a number of musical works, complete with analysis; there is documentary footage (including a one-hour film of Self's recent trip to Prague); a fascinating panel discussion with two leading translators; not to mention archival photographs, clips of recent Kafka debates, and even an online game! [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Will Self
• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Will Self: Kafka's Wound
• Judith Butler: How to Read Kafka
• Francis Bacon: Free e-book
• Free Penguin Classics iPad App
• Jack Kerouac's On the Road as iPad app
• T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land as iPad app

Contra Mundum Press awarded grant

Petőfi Literary Museum awards independent publishing house

From Contra Mundum Press:

Contra Mundum Press is honored to announce that within our very first year as a publishing house we have received a grant. Just last week the Petőfi Literary Museum awarded us a grant for our forthcoming translation (September 2012) of Miklós Szentkuthy’s Marginalia on Casanova, the first book of Szentkuthy’s epic multi-volume work St. Orpheus Breviary. Read the news on Hungarian Literature Online [Read more]

Originally published in 1939, as Csaba Sík noted, the seven volumes of the St. Orpheus Breviary “represent the greatest enterprise in scope, in worth? – undertaken in the Hungarian novel.” Justifiably, Szentkuthy has been compared to Proust, Musil, and Joyce, and has already been translated into French, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovakian, and Spanish. Our translation was done by Tim Wilkinson (known for his translations of Imre Kertész and others) and will feature an original cover designed by Hungarian artist István Orosz.

As the first ever translation of Szentkuthy into English, this should prove to be a momentous if not even historic publication for the Anglophone world. Over the next decade, CMP hopes to publish a tr. of the entirety of Szentkuthy’s Breviary and many other works, including his monumental Prae. News will follow about possible book events this coming fall in NYC, if not elsewhere...

Forthcoming next from CMP is a new edition of W.J. Bate’s long out of print canonical study on Keats, Negative Capability: The Intuitive Approach in Keats, featuring an introduction by the distinguished Italian poet, playwright, and critic Maura Del Serra.

Other forthcoming publications include Richard Foreman’s Plays with Films, Elio Petri’s Writings on Cinema and Life (the first ever translation into English), and Nietzsche’s Greek Music Drama (another first ever translation into English).

Our most recent publication was Rainer J. Hanshe’s controversial novel, The Abdication, which Stuart Kendall called “a book both experimental and assured, a comedy of high seriousness and gospel of the flesh that our winded civilization has needed for 2,000 years.”

Website: Contra Mundum Press

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Contra Mundum Press
• Stuart Kendall translates Gilgamesh
• Rainer J. Hanshe, The Acolytes
• Rainer J. Hanshe on The Acolytes
• Ghérasim Luca, Self-Shadowing Prey

Roberto Bolaño on Literature, Kafka and the Abyss

An interview with Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño

Cynthia Haven's excellent blog, The Book Haven, hosted on the Stanford University website, has posted an extract from an interview with the late Chilean poet and novelist Roberto Bolaño (link via Daniel Medin):

Which authors would you number among your precursors? Borges? Cortázar? Nicanor Parra? Neruda? Kafka? In Tres you write: “I dreamt that Earth was finished. And the only human being to contemplate the end was Franz Kafka. In heaven, the Titans were fighting to the death. From a wrought-iron seat in Central Park, Kafka was watching the world burn.”

I never liked Neruda. At any rate, I would never call him my one of precursors. Anyone who was capable of writing odes to Stalin while shutting his eyes to the Stalinist terror doesn’t deserve my respect. Borges, Cortázar, Sábato, Bioy Casares, Nicanor Parra: yes, I’m fond of them. Obviously I’ve read all of their books. I had some problems with Kafka, whom I consider the greatest writer of the twentieth century. It wasn’t that I hadn’t discovered his humor; there’s plenty of that in his books. Heaps. But his humor was so highly taut that I couldn’t bear it. That’s something that never happened to me with Musil or Döblin or Hesse. Not with Lichtenberg either, an author I read frequently who fortifies me without fail.

Musil, Döblin, Hesse wrote from the rim of the abyss. And that is commendable, since almost nobody wagers to write from there. But Kafka writes from out of the abyss itself. To be more precise: as he’s falling. When I finally understood that those had been the stakes, I began to read Kafka from a different perspective. Now I can read him with a certain composure and even laugh thereby. Though no one with a book by Kafka in his hands can remain composed for very long. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Roberto Bolaño on Lost Books

Mark M. Freed, Robert Musil and the NonModern

Free preview available online

Robert M. Freed, Robert Musil and the NonModern

Mark Thwaite's excellent Ready Steady Book has drawn my attention to a new study, Mark M. Freed's Robert Musil and the NonModern (Continuum, 2011):

Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities is widely recognized as a monument of modernist literature alongside Remembrance of Things Past and Ulysses. But while Musil is a major scholarly industry in the German-speaking world, critical attention from English-speaking scholars remains disproportionately small. Moreover, there has been little engagement with Musil’s contribution to cultural theory from those working outside literary studies.

Freed brings Musil into dialogue with such critics of the modern as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Lyotard and argues that Musil’s theory and literary performance of essayism constitutes a strategy of nonmodernity: that is, an engagement with the problems of modernity that does not re-inscribe the distinctions on which modernism grounded itself. [Read More]